Grifters, Activism, and Thomas Massie

 Massie did this to himself.

This isn’t a column about Thomas Massie. Not really. But he does figure into the analysis, especially since the voters of his Kentucky congressional district decided they’d had enough of him and voted him out of office in the Republican primary election Tuesday night.

The Federalist’s Sean Davis had a pretty good take on why:

It might take a while to surface, but people can generally spot insincerity. And they spotted it with Massie.

Something I’ve noticed is that people on the Right tend to sniff it out a little faster than the ordinary folks on the Left do — which is interesting to me, because the political “insiders” I’ve met on the Left are a million times more cynical and conniving than the ones on the Right are. In fact, there is a problem with naivete among Republican pols that drives me insane when I see it manifested — Bill Cassidy, who was torched by his own party’s base voters in Louisiana on Saturday, is a great example of a born political sucker who has spent the better part of two decades being treated as a mark in Washington, D.C., without learning a thing.

Lots of Republican voters look at their politicians and conclude GOP failure is intentional. The politicians I’ve met plying their trade up there don’t really impress me as schemers. They’re generally just not all that good at their jobs.

And why would they be? The smartest people on the Right are in the private sector, because capitalism is a lot more interesting and lucrative — and moral — than the pursuit of political power.

Unless you’re the kind of psychopath who believes power over your fellow man, and coercive power, at that, is the sexiest and best of all the things.

Here we’re talking about villagers and pillagers again, per my column on that subject a week or so ago. (RELATED: When the Villagers Finally Have Had Enough of the Pillagers)

Massie’s brand was that he was one of the villagers. He was for small government, balanced budgets, sound money, and so on. But as many have noted, Massie went from never talking at all about Jeffrey Epstein before last year to not being able to stop talking about that subject since, without noting that virtually every notable figure tied to Epstein from Bill Clinton to Larry Summers to Bill Gates to Oprah to Tom Hanks is a major-league Democrat figure.

And in doing that, Massie revealed, whether intentionally or not and whether accurately or not, that all of this conservative small-government warrior street cred he’d built up was a fugazi.

Spurious. Not genuine. And not worth supporting.

Conservatives have a deep, healthy distrust of politicians. That accounts for a great deal of the loyalty Trump still enjoys more than a decade after his entry into electoral politics — Trump still doesn’t seem like one of them, and he certainly isn’t part of the D.C. cloakroom crowd, and the things he does are, more often than his predecessors, deleterious to the cloakroom crowd’s interests. At one point it was thought Massie wasn’t part of the in-crowd, either, but then he became the darling of people like Ro Khanna and the editors of Politico by joining in the Epstein chorus.

His constituents noticed, and they pulled the lever for Ed Gallrein, and now Thomas Massie can go and hang with Tucker and Candace.

People catch on to the grifters eventually. One of the benefits of a conservative mindset is that you have a natural suspicion of political power and that helps to smoke out the charlatans.

Alternatively there is a certain mindset that seeks the easy deliverance of utopia in our time that our institutions promote. That mindset opens people up to be taken advantage of — sometimes in the most tragic of ways.

Jim Jones did that, and killed more than 900 in the jungles of Guyana.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota were more recent examples. Someone convinced them that nonviolent resistance involves trying to run over a federal officer in the execution of his duties, or carrying a pistol into a fistfight with ICE agents arresting a woman for trying to stop them from deporting a child molester. Those same people want you to believe Renee Good and Alex Pretti were martyrs.

They weren’t martyrs. They were marks. They were useful idiots who were sacrificed by schemers at well-funded NGOs for a political narrative — underlying which is the recognition that if Trump’s mass deportation effort is effective, it kills the chance of importing tens of millions of Third World voters who’ll fundamentally alter the electorate beyond just changing the congressional maps to favor blue states and cities.

And it isn’t as well understood as it should be that this is the case.

In a different context, Abraham Lincoln understood this well. “Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts,” he asked in an 1863 letter to Erastus Corning, “while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert?”

It was the grifters who ginned Renee Good and Alex Pretti up to sacrifice themselves on the altar of political narrative. The wily agitators never sacrifice themselves; they’re in constant search for sufficiently pliable soldier boys.

And the Left is a movement built on supplying them, in ways which all-too-often confound the wily agitators on the Right.

As Massie found, to his gross misfortune.

One more thing along these lines — here in Louisiana there is a recall effort afoot which seeks to depose the governor, Jeff Landry, and the attorney general, Liz Murrill.

To do this is an impossibility in everything but name. It’ll take just under 501,000 signatures to force a recall election of Landry or Murrill, with only six months to gather those signatures. No statewide official has ever been recalled in the state’s history, and Louisiana has been beset with far, far worse than Landry or Murrill. Everyone knows neither will be recalled.

But a couple of grifters named Marian Gbaiwon and KatilynPatricia Collins — the former styles herself a “Liberian-American creative visionary, entrepreneur, and advocate who builds movements, not moments,” as her website claims (she’s a wedding photographer) — have started up the petition drives anyway. The Landry recall is a second bite at the apple — their initial dry run was an effort to recall Baton Rouge mayor-president Sid Edwards that ran out of gas after it racked up a signature total in the teens — and it’s got a little more juice in the aftermath of the Callais decision and Landry’s executive order suspending the state’s congressional primaries until a legal congressional map could be drawn up.

But again — there will be no recall of Landry or Murrill. And everyone knows it. Moreover, both are up for reelection next year. Efforts to remove them from office would properly revolve around finding electable candidates and running them against the governor and AG.

Yes, but nobody is going to give Marian Gbaiwon and KaitlynPatricia Collins that responsibility. But the recall petition is something they own.

And the signatures on that petition, and the contact information gathered from the signers — that’s something else they own.

You’re free to evaluate the employment pedigree and personal honor of these two individuals and decide whether it’s a smart move to give them your contact information or swallow what guarantees they might offer that you won’t become commoditized and monetized until you’re buried in spam for the rest of your days. That’s precisely what’s going to happen to these people:

The Bywater, in case you aren’t familiar with New Orleans, is the neighborhood in the city — the state of Louisiana as a whole, for that matter — where all the Renee Goods and Alex Prettis are most numerous. Louisiana doesn’t have the volume of useful idiots that Minnesota does.

But like P.T. Barnum said, there’s one born every minute.

Thomas Massie could have chosen to be a Democrat before he made it to Congress. He might choose to be one now that he’s burned himself with Republicans. But in his political denouement, what he proved was that his constituents found him out eventually.

And Massie can’t blame this on Trump. Trump was merely the nemesis to his hubris.  Massie did this to himself. Sometimes, the grifters become the marks, and that’s the end of the grift.

https://spectator.org/grifters-activism-and-thomas-massie/